County’s Cabdrivers Ride With a Regular These Days--Fear

Once, in the middle of the day, taxi driver Lynne Taylor had a customer pull a gun. He never threatened her with it, but he did complete a crack deal in the back seat of the cab.

Steve Wilson, as big and burly as any cabbie alive, had a fare rob him at knifepoint in Southeast San Diego, an area to which Wilson now refuses to go. He lost $50 “and a lot of pride.”

Being a cabdriver is no easy line of work, despite the freedom, the autonomy and the chance to converse with any number of characters.

Robbed First, Then Shot

That was brought home to the estimated 4,000 cabbies in the county this week when one of their own, 25-year-old Michael Carroll, an independent driver for Coast Cab, was shot in the back of the head by a customer who had already robbed him of his money.

Late Tuesday night, Carroll remained in critical condition on a life-support system at Mercy Hospital.

“I’d say, yes, it’s relatively dangerous to be a cabdriver in San Diego, and getting more that way,” said Detective Ed Roberts, the officer investigating the case for the San Diego Police Department.

Carroll, who was shot about 1 a.m. Monday, was the second cabdriver to be robbed in the city within a 24-hour period. He’s one of 20 cabbies who were mugged, beaten, stabbed or shot this year.

Steve Wilson, a dispatcher for Coast Cab and a driver for Checker Cab, said the shooting of a cabbie sends the same repercussions through the ranks of taxi drivers that are felt by police when one of theirs takes a bullet.

He said it also engenders “a kind of paranoia” directed against the police, whom drivers criticize for not doing more to prevent crime against cabbies; the Metropolitan Transit Development Board, which regulates cabdrivers with what some consider adversary aggressiveness, and passengers themselves, who take on a suspicious aura as potential perpetrators of crime.

Used to Joke About It

“You’re going to see a lot of fares turned down this week,” Wilson said, “no matter how clean the passengers look. It’s going to be almost impossible for anybody to get a lift to East San Diego.”

Detective Roberts said Carroll picked up a passenger on Bates Street, near 58th Street and University Avenue. Lynne Taylor, who works for the same company as Carroll, said her fellow drivers used to joke about Bates Street as “the place where Norman Bates hangs out,” referring to the murdering sociopath in the movie “Psycho.”

“Now the jokes don’t seem so funny,” she said.

Roberts said the passenger asked Carroll to take him to a liquor store, which he did, and that someone there bought beer for the assailant, who police believe is under 21.

“He put a gun to the side of Carroll’s head,” Roberts said, “and made him hand over an undetermined amount of money. Carroll gave him the money before they even got out of the cab. He then ordered Carroll out of the cab, and, when Carroll started running, the suspect fired two rounds, one of which struck Carroll in the head.”

Cabdriver Taylor blames the nation’s drug problem for making her job more perilous. She and about a dozen other drivers interviewed around the city Tuesday said that taxis are increasingly used as ferries for drug deals and liquor runs for minors who are armed.

Lower Rates, and Clientele

Taylor, who has driven a Coast cab for four years, said Coast sometimes attracts a “lesser clientele” because its rates are among the lowest in town--$1 plus $1.20 per mile, contrasted with $1 plus $1.60 per mile for most companies.

Not long ago, Taylor picked up a customer in Pacific Beach. He asked her to take him to 50th Street and Imperial Avenue in Southeast San Diego.

“We get there,” she said, “and six kids, gang types, rush the cab. The rider pulls out three $20 bills. One of the kids grabs the money, and they all take off running. Lo and behold, this guy pulls out a pistol and threatens to ice the kids right there. So they creep back to the cab and hand him the drugs--you know, crack.

“He tells me to take him back to PB and proceeds to smoke the crack in this little pipe of his the whole way back. He gets out in PB, pays me $35 for the round-trip fare and gives me an additional $15 as a tip. Except for the gun and the drugs, he was a real nice customer. I had to go home and have a schnapps. I was worthless for two days.”

Like each of her colleagues lined up at Lindbergh Field on Tuesday morning, some from Ethiopia, some from Oklahoma, some from Chula Vista, Taylor likes being a cabbie for the obvious reasons. She leases a cab for the minimum of 20 days a month and “can pretty much call my own hours. I go by my wallet, not the clock,” she said. “If I need money, I work. If I don’t, I won’t. I’ll take a day off and enjoy myself.”

Before the revolution, she taught English in Iran. She knows cabbies with master’s degrees and says that most have a Steinbeckian affinity for the Everyman, the cool, colorful characters of a crazy world. The affinity is increasingly being compromised, she said, by the dangers of the job.

Considered Quitting

She considered giving up the work two years ago, when a pair of female drivers, one for Coast, the other for Yellow Cab, were killed in the same week.

She said the police don’t do enough to prosecute unpaid fares and more serious crimes against cabbies, and she believes the Metropolitan Transit Development Board, which Jan. 1 took over the city’s job of regulating cabs, ought to require New York-style bulletproof dividers between driver and passengers, as well as automatic window locks.

Barbara Luprow, the “paratransit regulatory administrator” for the MTDB, said the agency meets with “an industry committee every couple months or so, and so far they’ve argued against” dividers and automatic door locks.

“They say most drivers want to be able to converse with the passengers,” Luprow said.

“But not when they’re firing guns!” said Kenny Nagy, a driver for the independent Israel Cab.

Nagy said his biggest problem is not with customers but with the MTDB and its two in-the-field agents, whom he labeled “the Gestapo.”

Might Return to Ice Cream

Luprow said the agents’ job is to check for bald tires and other faulty equipment and to enforce the rules that govern cabbies. She said the rules are aimed at protecting the consumer.

“I was an ice cream man,” Nagy said. “I just took this job to get away from kids. But I may go back to ice cream. These two MTDB guys are really overzealous, and they go after the little guys like me more than they do the big guys, like the ones who drive for Yellow.

“They give tickets for everything . And the cops. . . . You drop off somebody in Horton Plaza in a red zone, and they give you a ticket for it! With guys getting shot now, I’m really not sure it’s worth it.”

Taylor said drivers must develop their own methods of self-protection. Her first defense is the hours she works.

“I drive 6:30 to 6:30,” she said. “And, in the winter, I stop an hour earlier--because it’s dark. I can pick up a sweetheart in a three-piece suit at the Sheraton, but, if it’s after dark, he looks like any other gargoyle to me.”

Steve Wilson, who since his attack said he carries handcuffs and a night stick “and a knowledge of how to use them”--even though the MTDB rules prohibit drivers from carrying any weapons--said cabbies now list five “hot spots” where most refuse to go under any circumstances: south of University Avenue and east of 40th Street in East San Diego; east of 25th Street between A and K streets; Logan Heights; Encanto, and 40th Street and Imperial Avenue in Southeast San Diego.

Taylor said she prefers a clientele consisting mainly of sailors and the elderly “because they’re safer bets.” But, every once in a while, she gets a “real character,” the kind that keeps her behind the wheel.

“One woman, a law student here locally, wanted me to drive her to the beach and made me sit there and talk to her for an hour--with the meter running and both of us just staring at the sunset. This other guy paid me $150 to take him to L.A. and back, and then tipped me an extra $100. Some people, like him, will tell a cabbie more than they’ll tell their shrink. He gets in the car and says, ‘When I was 6 months old, my mother . . . ‘

“It’s a neat job,” Taylor said with a sigh. “Too bad it’s getting so dangerous.”